Arguably one of the greatest American philosophers of the 20th Century, Yogi Berra, is credited with saying: “when you come to a for in the road take it!”     Well, we are doing just that. To date we have been concerned with forces leading to increasingly more progressive politics, albeit in fits and starts, during the period 1990-2040, but especially beginning in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama. Our pieces have stressed that with Affordable Health Care, initiatives on the environment, the Depression-dodging stimulus package, and many  incremental steps the country has moved slowly back toward the center. But in the short term, we are not so sure. And as Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman have pointed out in domestic and foreign policy, the “slouching toward progressive rationality,” and difficulties of the Obama administration are not primarily of Obama’s making.

So here is the fork this blog is taking: 1. We want to become more involved in discussing foreign policy questions, really as much a part of a progressive agenda as domestic policy; we will have pieces on current and future dilemmas by Shiels and Lerman, 2. We want to open up a debate about how progressives should proceed in the next five years. It is clear that there is unprecedented polarization and deadlock, likely to continue until 2016. So We, The Blog, have the same choices that progressive “real world” strategists do: 1. shall we turn to a more wrathful, (read honest), fusillade against the reactionary, obstructionist forces of the Boehner/McConnell Congress and its Tea Party “Observers.”? or

2. should we stick with the thesis that incremental, dogged, centrist change– the style seemingly favored by Obama and the Clintons, will inch us forward, while the country tires of the unrelenting negativity of the Republican Congress. Republican, perhaps, only until 2016. The senate of course is technically Democratic and with luck may remain so. But with the lavish use of the filibuster, it is effectively neutralized even if it is lucky enough to hold on through the next election cycle. A mantra increasingly gaining traction among commentators is: 2014 will be a bad year for the Democrats, 2016 will be a Horrible year for the Republicans. More on this to come!

PLAYBOOK FOR 2014 PROGRESSIVE  ACTIVISTS

• How to “bring unions back,” updated if need be, so that they are more of a force to reckon with in U.S. politics… (this will probably involve beefing up left-to-center think tanks and gradual infiltration into the essentially passive and spineless media)

• Related: Progressives: Democrats, Independents, and (if there are any left) Republicans need to recruit millionaires/billionaires, 1%-ers, 10%-ers to bankroll publicity, websites, newspapers, journals, electronic media (radio, TV, I-Net) for progressive causes: environment, education, poor, women, minorities, Labor, infrastructure, you-name-it… offset or “mine” Citizens United for their own purposes

• Related- Progressives need to stop playing softball; they can occupy the center ground, and in reddish states even move a bit right but comfortably to the left of the hard-Red intransigents (of which there are plenty)… Rachel Maddow and Thomas Frank are a good examples of people who can play “hardball” and administer the kind of sane medicine to the public, as an antidote to the  Conservative talk-meisters, not to mention radio nut-cases

• Related- In the near future, the climate of, say, the mid-1960s—1970’s, the 1930s, or the T. Roosevelt-Taft-Wilson period, 1901-1915, may not be attainable in the U.S., with its present extreme polarization and federal government dysfunction… but the tide is turning, especially in the Executive branch… keeping an eye on Texas, the White House may well be out of reach for the Republicans by 2020 (and likely in 2016)… it will take winning hearts and minds for the Congressional districts/ House elections to turn the country around for the progressives

• Related-  Progressives have to realize that while their agenda is, without doubt, the sane way to go, and that in today’s political climate “fair and balanced” is a myth if, for example, that means Intellectually buying into the idea of splitting the difference between the climate-change deniers and the cutting edge climate environmentalists, STILL politically they have to face the fact that there are a lot of conservative folks out there, voters who have been Reaganized and have little memory of the party of Dirksen or Javits… We’re not just talking about the 20-25% Tea Party types who have drunk the kool-aid and are out of reach, but the next 25% who voted for McCain and Romney… they must be coaxed into reason (did someone say Bill Clinton?) a bit at a time and we, at https://progressivefutureusa.com/ , are staking our reputation on the slow steady leftward drift of the Zeitgeist in the U.S. from now through 2050 and beyond… “marriage equality” is a good sign, maybe in ten years or so, flag lapel pins for politicians will become “declasse”

• We have to face up to the fact—and make this palatable—that at least some increase in taxation, especially at the higher levels, has got to happen, to shore up Medicare and Social Security, for starters… the Grover Norquist and company argument that taxation is outdated are not mentally living on this planet, but too many people buy their pitch… this is fundamental change, let’s face it, and it will be an uphill climb.

Income inequality

Much has been written about income and wealthy inequality in the United States. You probably know the round figures (illustrated in the graph above for 2007, but not much has changed in 7 years): 1% of the population owning 34% of the wealth and the next 9% owning 36%, for a total of 70% of the wealth held by 10% of Americans. The Bottom 50% of the population holds 2.7% of the wealth. (perhaps the 9% who share roughly the same % of the wealth as “the 1%” – about 35% each—should be jealous!).

We will be discussing the closing gap of income inequality between the U.S. and Brazil, the latter another very large economy with the reputation for even more inequality. Using the Gini index of inequality Brazil ranked 120^th of 133 countries studied, but the U.S. was 80^th. This gap has closed somewhat. Neither country is at all competitive with countries like Canada or most of the European countries.

But wait—a contrarian question might be “so what”? Throughout history a very small percentage of the population owned vastly disproportionate shares of the material resources of society, particularly in the post hunter-gatherer populations, and dramatically so in most of the centuries since the rise of the first urban civilizations about 3000 to 2500 BCE. Between about 1895 and 1995, there was a gradual shift toward slightly more widespread dispersion of wealth throughout the industrializing world (mostly Europe and North America), but in the U.S. the trend has reversed in the past 20 years.

A particularly striking statistic is the trend for “1%” followers is to look at their share of the national income over the last 70 years. Between 1940 and 1980 this share fluctuated between 10 and 15% of INCOME (not wealth). Between 1980 and 2007 that share went from about 10% to 20%. Otherwise put, in 1980 income from wages, salaries, and investment yield increases for every $1000 of American income went from $10 for the top 1%– one out of every hundred Americans—to $20, an approximate doubling. Although it may be even more troubling in fairness and utilitarian terms that similar increases in income occurred for the top 10% of Americans, the focus of the left to center commentators (and Occupy Wall Streeters) was on the ONE PERCENT. That seems to be where the drama lies. Think again now: 1%+> 20% of income, 10% => 40% of income and the bottom 40% (2 lowest quintiles) shared 9% repeat 9% of the income of the country. This is a lot of numbers to absorb, and more detailed breakdowns and explanations and conclusions can be found in numerous sources.

What we want to argue HERE is that yes, clearly there is a dramatic shift of wealth going on in the direction of a small group at the top. America in this sense MIGHT be said to not only becoming more like a typical Third World country, or like many societies throughout history going back through the Middles Ages to ancient times, but also that the U.S. is becoming dramatically less equal in income along several lines of measurement in the past 30 years and compared with the 60 years before that.

Again we pose the question, “So what?” It may seem self-evident that this is not a good thing, that more equality is better, but this is not universally agreed upon. It will be good to hone in on the arguments (the very most important ones—and unusual) for both or several points of view on this!